The Mormons and the Twilight Zone

My parents became Mormons through an act of revenge. The drunken neighbor lady was angry at my mother, and so she sent the Mormon missionary's on her like a pair of rabid dogs. My mother answered the door with a beer in her hand and a smile on her face. To get even with the neighbor, my parents took the Mormon lessons- which meant my ister and I had to take the lessons as well.

As the two innocent nineteen year old missionaries sat in front of my family, my parents would nod their heads, but I thought I was listening to something from the Twilight Zone. Any second I was waiting for Rod Serling to enter the room and say, "You have just entered the Twilight Zone." On the other hand, maybe this was some really stupid joke and Allen Funt would pop up any minute from behind a closet door and say, "Smile, you're on Candid Camera." Truth was neither one of them showed up. Just the two young boys who told convoluted tales of some man who found these weird golden plates and used some weird ass stone to interrupt them and then once these plates were translated, this guy started this church where men got to have as many wives as they wanted, God was from a different planet and all Mormons had to prepare the second coming of Christ, which meant they had to stock up on tons of food because I suspect Christ would have a hearty appetite with all his destruction and stuff.

It just sounded like something from one of my mother's horror movies. I was not buying it. My parents brought it hook sink and line-I on the other hand was not buying their crap of the man with many wives. How could my mother possibly comprehend what these Mormons were saying? I was nine and could barely make sense of it. They handed us brochures to read. I thought they were great. I would look at the brochure and try to find the hidden messages in them. The stories they told were so far fetched that I just knew the brochures must have some secret code. I was young yet I knew the Mormons had some bizarre and weird beliefs and felt rather cultish. I was convinced that there was some sort of hidden camera somewhere and this was being filmed for some sort of science fiction television show.

When the Mormons were there, I would spend time looking at all their stuff in hopes to find the hidden camera. I looked in their knapsacks and anything they were carrying with them. I knew this had to be a joke. You see the Mormons believed that God came from a different planet and he had many wives. Now I was only nine years old, but I was pretty sure that God lived in Heaven and not some planet called Kolob.

It sort of reminded me of one of the Twilight Zone episodes "To Serve Man," which was about a bunch nine foot tall aliens named the Kanamits who came down to earth supposedly to help us. They helped us find cures for all sickness, they found a way to make unfertile ground fertile so we would have plenty food and they told us the secrets to end the need for war. They were here, just like the Mormons, to serve us. They had a special book just like the Mormons did as well. The Mormons had the Book of Mormon, and the aliens had a book called "To Serve Man." The Mormon's book was pretty far fetched, and the alien's book was a cook book on how to cook people into yummy tasty meals. Was God going to come down and cook us? Was that the second coming? Dinner for two anyone?

I would wonder off in my mind as the missionaries spoke and would pretend that we did enter the Twilight Zone and Rod Serling was talking. "Picture this if you will," he would say. "A crazy man who believes God is from another planet called Kolob and creates a religion; a special religion." Rod would continue in his narrative voice. "Imagine for just another moment that this man creates a church called Mormonism. Within this church, man marries as many women as they can and impregnate them with their seed creating more and more Mormons. Soon the Mormons would rule the world."

Rod Serling would then enter a room, look out the window and glare at the moon. Below the moon is a graveyard and he continues to speak. "Imagine that when the Mormon offspring die, they wait for the second coming of Christ so they can rise from the grave and walk the earth." I would snap out of my daydream with a slight shiver and realized this was not the Twilight Zone, but the stories that the Mormon literature was telling us.

Oh my goodness I thought, this reading material is better than the science fiction that was at the school library and far better than the comic books on my mothers book stand. I found the material to be rather entertaining and compared it often to the Twilight Zone. To this day, I must admit that the Twilight Zone still remains my personal favorite shows in reruns and I own the complete collection.